The New Republic

Occupy Wall Street is a carnival. Both detractors and supporters say so. The most amusing part of the show is watching the rush to join it. When Deepak Chopra and Suze Orman endorse the cause, you have to wonder about its revolutionary bona fides. Democrats have also flung themselves in the direction of Zuccotti Park—but in their pursuit of the movement they may damage themselves and hinder the protests’ potential to do tangible good.

Mark Schmitt shrewdly suggested that liberals had long been fantasizing about a Tea Party of the left. But I also think serious journalists had been waiting for some bellow of outrage over the way that Wall Street plutocrats had been laughing all the ...

“We really need to get out of this mentality in this country that people look at public schools as if they are a jobs program,” Jason Delisle, the director of the New America Foundation's Federal Education Budget Project, told me. ...

The most well-known of the genre are Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, Parag Khanna's The Second World, and, from a more academic perspective, Charles Kupchan's The End of the American Era.The Obama administration has appropriated some of the ...

In his deficit-reduction proposal, unveiled in his Rose Garden speech on Monday, President Obama once again found himself adopting the other party’s frame, embracing budget austerity instead of the fiscal stimulus that the economy needs. He still talks about finding bipartisan consensus and describes his ideas as common-sense solutions that every well-intentioned person should support, even though Republicans have shown they’ll block anything with his name on it.

I have covered the story of violent jihadism for the past 18 years, and, more than anything else, it has been a slow process of discovery. Looking back, it seems clear to me that, at any given moment in the story, there was always so much we didn’t know.

Flannery O’Connor once described the contradictory desires that afflict all of us with characteristic simplicity. “Free will does not mean one will,” she wrote, “but many wills conflicting in one man.” The existence of appealing alternatives, after all, is what makes free will free: What would choice be without inner debate? We’re torn between staying faithful and that alluring man or woman across the room. We can’t resist the red velvet cake despite having sworn to keep our calories down.